‘The Boys’ Keeps Crossing A Line With Hughie And It’s Far From Funny

The Boys has been a bit of a mess this season. With the Season 4 finale just around the corner, I’m not hopeful that we’ll get a particularly satisfying resolution. I have basically four main complaints this season:

• First, the show seems to be spinning its wheels, going around in circles, treading water, whatever you want to call it, almost as if it’s stalling for time. It’s like they had an idea of how they wanted it to end and then had to fill up a bunch of episodes to get there. How many times can our heroes make terrible plans and then execute them terribly, requiring a save from A-Train, a convenient fail from the bad guys or some other wild good luck to survive?
• Second, why is Homelander still exercising so much restraint? He should have stomped our heroes like bugs ages ago. As much as they’ve made him the Big Bad, they’ve also made him a lot less frightening than he used to be. Like the rest of the series, Homelander just stands in place. No forward momentum allowed. Virtually nothing has changed since the end of Season 3. So much of that great, scary tension that Homelander brought to the show has been lost.
• Third, the show’s politics have become too on-the-nose. Yes, obviously The Boys was always a political satire, but it used to be clever satire that wasn’t just regurgitating the news cycle. There was one brief flash of that cleverness this season when the show made fun of the MCU movie timeline and did the whole “get woke, get yoked” bit. That was great. That was witty. The rest of this season just feels like “Hey, here’s something we heard on Fox News let’s reference it on The Boys!” So funny, guys. Wow.
• Finally, shock value is starting to sit-in for story. Shock value can be fun, but it can also wear thin. I’m all for quality gross and gory stuff in a show and The Boys has done plenty of that and it’s been very entertaining. But this season feels different, partly because the shock value isn’t pushing the story forward, but also because the writers seem to not understand what’s shocking but still funny and what’s shocking but genuinely disturbing. Some scenes this season would have benefited from a content warning at the beginning of the episode rather than a bunch of boneheaded commentary from producers after the fact. I wrote about the sexual assault of Hughie in Episode 6 and the monstrously tone-deaf comments about it from showrunner Eric Kripke. His response about the assault being “hilarious” makes me doubt the sincerity of this entire project.

Which brings me to this post. I hate to beat a dead horse (though the best episode of the season involved dead farm animals) but in Episode 7, we get yet another sexual assault and, once again, Hughie is the victim. It happens at the very end of the episode and while it’s not in such poor taste as the Tek-Knight / Webweaver scene in ‘Dirty Business’ it’s still pretty gross, especially since this season has seen Hughie lose his father, get a pretty crappy reunion with his terrible mother, and suffer a horrific sexual assault and near-death experience already, on top of all the other horrors he’s been through in previous seasons. And now this.

What this entails is a new shapeshifter that apparently doesn’t just take someone’s shape, but also their memories, allowing them to act like the person they’re copying and manipulate their targets accordingly. The new shapeshifter takes on Starlight’s form and then seduces Hughie using her discarded Starlight uniform that the real Starlight said earlier in the episode makes her sick to look at. They have sex and only afterwards do we, the audience, realize that this isn’t actually Starlight.

What do you call having sex with someone under false pretenses? We call it rape. I was actually reminded of Wonder Woman: 1984 which was a pretty terrible movie and involves a similar type of nonconsensual sex (Wonder Woman wishes her dead lover back into existence but he needs a host body so they basically steal another man’s body/mind and use it which is bad enough but they also have sex with this borrowed body, so yeah…gross). This isn’t exactly the same thing, but it’s similar. Hughie had sex with someone on false pretenses. He did not consent to have sex with this person, he was tricked by the shapeshifting. It’s gross. And it’s once again at Hughie’s expense, because for whatever reason he’s become the whipping boy of The Boys. They could have left the sex scene out entirely and still had the same basic plot with the shapeshift taking Starlight’s form, but it appears the current goal of The Boys is not to tell a good story, but to abuse Hughie as much as humanly possible.

The show didn’t play it for laughs this time, thank god, but it’s still yet another sexual assault in the very next episode. It’s not funny. And frankly, given the sheer degree of hate I received on social media from a lot of “fans” over my last post, it sure seems like this stuff is appealing mostly to the dregs of the fandom, people who care a lot less about the actual message of the show and just want to get their jollies watching gross stuff.

But hey, if the writers and producers of The Boys want to appeal to the lowest common denominator and ditch all the clever, thought-provoking stuff that made this show hum in the first three seasons, that’s their prerogative. For my part, I’ve lost a lot of respect I once had for The Boys. What a shame.

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